Partway through making Ne Zha 2, its director took back the work he had sent abroad. Jiaozi, whose real name is Yang Yu, had outsourced some shots to studios outside China, and they came back wrong. He told the state broadcaster CCTV that a top-tier studio might still put “third-rate staff” on his project. So the shots came home, and the whole film ended up being made in China.
The finished film went on to take $2,259,822,417 worldwide, according to the scholar Ying Zhu, and topped the global box office for 2025. Only about 1% of that came from outside China. That split is the story. Ne Zha 2 was the biggest film of the year and one that most of the world never went to see.
What the numbers came to
Ne Zha 2 opened on January 29, 2025, the first day of the Lunar New Year holiday. That day alone, China’s cinemas took $250 million, the biggest single day in the country’s history. Over its first five days the film earned $434.2 million, as much as the next three films combined, Screen reported.
Within days it passed The Battle at Lake Changjin, a 2021 propaganda film about the Korean War, to become China’s highest-grossing film. By February 10 it had taken $960.5 million in China, Animation Magazine reported. That beat the record for a single market, held since 2015 by Star Wars: The Force Awakens in the US. It then became the first film to earn $1 billion in one market.
On February 18, its 21st day, it passed Inside Out 2 as the highest-grossing animated film ever. Inside Out 2 had needed 80 days and a far wider release to set that record. Cartoon Brew noted that Disney had held the animation record for 82 of the previous 87 years. By early March, Screen reported, Ne Zha 2 was the seventh-biggest film of all time, behind only Titanic and a handful of American franchise films. By July it was fifth, and Cartoon Brew calculated that another $43 million would lift it past Titanic into fourth.
Where the idea came from
The character is old. Ne Zha comes from Chinese mythology and from The Investiture of the Gods, a 16th-century novel. In the films he is a demon child raised by humans, a boy who defies the fate the heavens set for him.
The sequel picks up where the 2019 original stopped. Ne Zha and his friend, the dragon prince Ao Bing, have lost their bodies. Ao Bing’s rebirth goes wrong, and his spirit has to share Ne Zha’s body while Ne Zha hunts for an elixir to restore him. The BFI’s reviewer pointed out that older versions, including a 1979 animated film, made the two boys enemies. Jiaozi made them friends.
The first Ne Zha, Jiaozi’s debut feature, earned $726 million worldwide. Animation Magazine called it China’s highest-grossing animated film of 2019 and the year’s top animated film made outside the US. So a sequel was expected to do well. Nobody was forecasting this. After the first five days, the ticketing platform Maoyan predicted $944 million, a figure that would already have been a Chinese record. Within another week it had raised its projection to $1.48 billion.
What it took to make
IndieWire reported that the film took five years and involved 138 animation companies and more than 4,000 crew. The number of shots rose from 1,800 in the first film to 2,400. One battle near the end reportedly puts 200 million characters on screen at once.
Variety’s reviewer described that climax as so vast that the fighters look like “minuscule specks in a flock of birds.” The same review called the film breathtaking but overloaded, running for nearly three hours. Chengdu Coco Cartoon produced it, and Beijing Enlight Pictures distributed it in China.
The scale showed up at the box office too. IndieWire reported that it became China’s highest-grossing Imax release. Ying Zhu described one sequence much discussed online, in which thousands of white-clad warriors in glowing golden bubbles pile up into the shape of an autumn tree on a mountaintop.
The BFI was less taken with the plot. Its critic found the story sprawling and the cast so large that on-screen captions name each new face. The critic also noted that the film is “a boy’s club,” with Ne Zha’s mother the only significant female character.
Who lost out
The holiday is crowded, and every other film paid for Ne Zha 2’s run. Screen reported that all six films opening on the first day of the holiday were built on existing properties. The second-placed Detective Chinatown 1900 took $253.1 million by February 2, a fraction of the leader’s haul.
The long-running Boonie Bears series felt it hardest. Its 11th film opened the same day as Ne Zha 2 and needed until February 16 to pass $100 million. The previous year’s instalment had taken more than $275 million in China.
Who it spoke to
The Guardian spoke to an independent film critic in Beijing who asked not to be named. With the economy weak and youth unemployment high, the critic said, the story of fighting unjust authority may have felt particularly apt. In one scene Ne Zha declares that his fate is his own, not heaven’s. When a country struggles, the critic said, people turn their attention to themselves.
The Guardian also pointed to luck. The Lunar New Year holiday is the one time many Chinese families go to the cinema each year. The writer Afra Wang, in an essay the Guardian quoted, described the film becoming part of a national mood that Chinese netizens called guoyun, or national destiny.
Then officialdom joined in. China’s commerce minister, Wang Wentao, praised the film for drawing people into cinemas at a time when the government wanted consumers to spend. One company in Shandong bought tickets for its 1,000 staff. Ying Zhu wrote that organised group screenings and repeat viewings pushed the total higher still.
When a film becomes a test
The success turned patriotic. BBC News reported that the film had become a litmus test, and quoted a Douyin user whose friend had called them unpatriotic for not seeing it. Viewers who criticised its plot or its humour were accused online of being paid “haters.”
Some fans read the film as a jab at the United States. Nationalists suggested that a gleaming white jade palace stood for the White House, the Guardian reported. Ying Zhu listed other readings circulating online, such as a green token some viewers compared to a US green card. The same fans turned on Marvel’s Captain America: Brave New World. Of the $92 million it had made outside the US by mid-February, only $10.6 million came from China, BBC News reported.
Why the rest of the world stayed away
Ne Zha 2 opened in the US and Canada on February 14. It took $7.2 million in its opening weekend there. By February 25, Cartoon Brew reported $13.8 million from the US and Canada, and $3.3 million from Australia, against $1.89 billion in China.
Some Chinese fans complained that North American cinemas gave the film too few screens. They also accused American cinemas of showing other films instead. Ying Zhu compared the result with Disney’s Zootopia 2, which came second to Ne Zha 2 in 2025 and earned 76.8% of its takings abroad. State media, she argued, overstated the film’s standing abroad when they praised it for telling “the good China story.”
Screen’s figures for the first weekend of March show the imbalance plainly. Of $67.9 million the film took worldwide that weekend, $1.8 million came from North America. Its fifth weekend in China alone brought an estimated $65.5 million.
The film asked a lot of outsiders. The BFI’s critic warned that the plot was easier to digest for those who knew the legends. The same critic thought the fights and bawdy humour might still carry it beyond the mainland.
A second try, in English
In July 2025, A24 and CMC Pictures announced an English-language dub for the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, opening on August 22. Michelle Yeoh voiced Ne Zha’s mother, Lady Yin. It was, Cartoon Brew noted, a rare move into franchise animation for A24, a company better known for Hereditary and Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Yeoh had seen the film in Hong Kong during its first run. She told IndieWire she rarely watches dubbed films, but thought children needed to hear this one to follow it. Yeoh said she wanted young viewers abroad to meet Chinese mythology the way she had as a child. Recording Lady Yin’s death scene left her, she said, “in the recording booth with a puddle of tears around me.”
She put the film’s appeal down to a story about being judged for who you are, and finding your worth anyway. In China that story became a national event. Outside it, the film that beat every Disney animation is still mostly a name people read about in box office charts.
